AS AN ALTERNATIVE, I SUGGEST 'EPIC FAIL': I'll be dealing with a couple of linguistic irritants today. First, lawyers must stop using the phrase "fatally flawed." I think that because people use this so often (and I used to do it early in my career, until somebody pointed this out to me), it's easy to miss the clumsiness of the metaphor. I would never have written in a brief that an argument was "DOA," "on life support," or "preparing to shuffle off this mortal coil." So why isn't something flawed just "insuperably" or "insurmountably," or better yet, why isn't it just "incorrect"? And that's to say nothing of the fact that none of us will ever concede that an argument is merely "injuriously flawed" or "flawed such that it must go on the 15-day DL and probably will not be 100% for the rest of the litigation season" -- omissions that essentially render the "fatally" superfluous.
Second, and I freely admit this is based on etymology and not current dictionary usage, I hate the fact that many people (especially radio journalists) use the words "meanwhile" and "meantime" interchangeably. The root of the former is (or can be) a conjunction; the root of the latter is a noun. You might say "while I went to the store," but -- unless you were writing some kind of archaic play -- you wouldn't say "time I went to the store." Thus, in my opinion, one can say "meanwhile, I went to the store," but one should say "in the meantime, I went to the store."
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